Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/212

Rh to which reference is made, should transcend the stream of experience itself, and should be really external to it. Into the stream of experience, as into the flux of Heraclitus, nobody descends twice at the same point. If, however, the sameness of reference is still possible, whereby many experiences bear upon, many thoughts portray, the same content of fact, existent beyond them all, then the relations of reference, if not the facts referred to, must be real beyond all experience.” Our realist might combine the present line of argument with the one which, in the foregoing discussion, he used to expound his second consideration. He might insist that whoever speaks of an object of possible experience not now presented, implies that this object is such that, were it converted into presentation, this presentation would somehow be knowable as identical with, as the same as, the object defined before presentation. If I see the light yonder on the horizon, and guess that it is a fire, the half-idealist of the foregoing discussion defines my object as my possible further experience of flame or heat in case I should approach the light. But, as our realist may now maintain, the experience which I should have if I approached the fire would not fulfil the defined possibility of experience, asserted by one who sees the light upon the horizon, unless one could say that, upon approach, he found the same light gradually expanding into the expected experience of fire, and unless he found that the fire later experienced was somehow the same as the fire expected. Without the category of Sameness, in the objects of concrete ex-